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Splitting is expressed through segregation in American psychoanalytic institutions.
Segregation does not require formal prohibitions against the membership or involvement of people of color in psychoanalytic institutions; indeed, it persists despite avowed wishes and attempts to recruit a wider membership of color (Malamed, 2022). The ongoing segregation of people of color as other to the discipline is de jure: not in the sense that institutional rules explicitly endorse segregation, but in the sense that nominally race-neutral rules leave the discriminatory and segregating effects of a history of exclusionary practices intact and, I would argue, propped up. To quote a participant in my research team’s recent study on discrimination in psychoanalytic organizations, describing the policies and procedures by which such institutions organize admissions, curriculum, governance, and community: “I think that’s purposefully keeping some communities out” (Carter, 2024).
This insidious splitting, generated by the maintenance of as-if (Deutsch, 1934) neutral policies and procedures about training and credentialing psychoanalysts, is compounded by a psychoanalytic culture and social atmosphere that reliably leads many people of color to want to flee. The most effective, yet plausibly deniable path to segregation is to make an environment horrible for people of color and trust that we will, in Mitt Romney’s phrase, self-deport. To quote another participant from my team’s study: “you know, it’s almost as if you need to know the secret password to be able to be accepted into that community” (Carter, 2024, see also Griffin et al., 2020).
The rules by which these institutions organize themselves - institutional rules, but also cultural and social rules - facilitate splitting that allows the existing power structure to believe that it is fighting segregation when, in fact, it is maintaining it. This, in turn, allows the (mainly white) people who benefit from the existing power structur